KickStarter Underworld Ascendant is a disaster

[Avonaeon]

Is there anything like this in the making?

Monomyth: https://store.steampowered.com/app/908360/Monomyth/

EDIT: Here's the Codex thread https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...rst-person-action-rpg-dungeon-crawler.115034/

 

[MasterLobar]

As a backer, perhaps most bothersome is repeatedly being treated like a complete idiot. Latest example (on the issue of new types of creatures):

If only we had more water for the Lurkers to swim around in :’(

The current list of creatures we’re looking at need to make sense for the Abyss layouts, be flexible, and have different behaviors from the prevalent Skeletons.

https://forums.otherside-e.com/t/march-19-weekly-update/9987/4

If only we had more water...

YOU GUYS ARE GAME DESIGNERS. YOU CAN TURN A PUDDLE INTO AN OCEAN IN AN INSTANT.

 

[Nyast]

What's funny is that they don't need to change anything. There are plenty of areas with water in the levels. Rofl.

 

[Fedora Master]

a backer
being treated like a complete idiot

Makes perfect sense to me.

 

[Katana1000S]

Decided to give this train wreck of a charade of a stupid game one last look today ... I paid for it, want my moneys worth ... fat chance I know.

So fresh install on Steam, because it was crash city last time, fresh install and was surprised to see my old saved game there, saw older saved games were there too, decided to start again though ... to be sure, to avoid patch glitches ... so, off we go into the Abyss once more (if only) slightly different intro, but still pure crap gameplay ... I did about 15 minutes and was needing a break ... thought OK, time for a save, lets see if the save system finally works now ... came back no more than 15 mins later, went to resume gameplay and my controls were reversed ... before when I used W on keyboard it was fine but then made me go backwards, same for side to side stuff A should be slide left, D should be slide right ... it was other way around... spent ages in control menu ... nothing was making a difference ... also the screen resolution dropped down to silly levels, am lucky enough to own a high powered rig, its built for intense flight simulation, DCS ETC, I7 8700K @ 5 GHz, 32 GB ram, Titan X pascal 12 GB and 4K monitor ... absolutely no problems with anything else, but this stupid game could not hold the resolution, it kept going down to default resolution stuff.

Stuck at it though, got my 4K res to stick, was getting somewhere and guess what? it crashed to desktop ... bang, just like that.

Whatever these arseholes do, wherever they may roam after this I will make a point of exposing their lying cheating ways as regards UA and for sure point folk away from SS3 too.

Its my considered opinion these people are nothing more than rotten crooks, out for a fast buck and now they want to try same with SS3.

Jail these people ... jail them!

Make an example of them!

 

[MasterLobar]

It is also clear by now why they lied about the true state of the game all the way to release. Starbreeze had a cancellation option. They had to wait as long as possible and skim as much money as possible from Starbreeze before all the incompetence and mismanagement at OS Boston comes to light.

They were afraid, Starbreeze would ask inconvenient questions, so they kept the UA scam under the rug for as long as possible --- or more precisely until 505 said enough is enough.

Btw, 30-day reviews are down again to "mostly negative" (33%). But of course all those positive reviews popping up right after Update 2 that pushed that number to 75% were all legit, right?

 

[thesheeep]

But the philosopher kings in the Ivory Tower are still happy:

This sort of thing is such a cop out.

The reason why people can claim "hey great ideas are easy, I have heaps of them!" is because they don't have to prove that they're good ideas. Most of the time they're just not.

Well, it's not really a cop out, is it? A cop out from what?
Good ideas ARE much easier than good executions. Also, the "idea" of a game is usually a pretty high-level thing, a concept that fits on two sheets of paper max. I'm fairly sure their idea for UA wasn't nearly as bad as the product turned out.
Something like how save games are done is more of a detail and part of the execution, if you ask me. It is not usually a core concept of the game.

 

[Max Heap]

So what happened to those stretch-goals? Especially the content relevant ones...

I know the underswamp is in. So is the "intelligent" Lizardman race. Without those the game would have significantly less content (or NPCs).
But what happened to the "Resonant Caves"? I believe via paypal pledges they should have even reached the Necroplis stretch-goal.

Not that I expect anything, but any word on that at all?

 

[Excommunicator]

But the philosopher kings in the Ivory Tower are still happy:

This sort of thing is such a cop out.

The reason why people can claim "hey great ideas are easy, I have heaps of them!" is because they don't have to prove that they're good ideas. Most of the time they're just not.

Well, it's not really a cop out, is it? A cop out from what?

It's a cop out by not having to take responsibility. Because execution has so many external factors it's easier for people to accept something was poorly executed because it doesn't necessarily reflect on them. You can't do that with ideas so it's about having to accept your own mistakes. Or pretending that all ideas are easy and effortless and only matter in execution. Good way to deflect responsibilty too.

Good ideas ARE much easier than good executions. Also, the "idea" of a game is usually a pretty high-level thing, a concept that fits on two sheets of paper max. I'm fairly sure their idea for UA wasn't nearly as bad as the product turned out.
Something like how save games are done is more of a detail and part of the execution, if you ask me. It is not usually a core concept of the game.

Sure having a good idea is easier than executing it. Usually it is, yes. But you can't execute something and make it turn out brilliant when it's a fundamentally bad idea.

Ideas are big and small, they're dreamy and they're practical, they're technical and they're intuitive, and they're good and bad. You can try to split hairs on where an idea ends and where the execution begins but this example was a bad idea for the game, period. Can't pretend they just failed to execute. There are hundreds of such examples out there

 

[MasterLobar]

Community manager reveals UA budget was in the neighborhood of $5-6 million.

Shock3's original budget was around $12-13 million from Starbreeze [...]. UA's total budget has been less than half of that.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/692840/discussions/0/1848072002772540554/#c1769259642860738259

If I remember correctly the KS was ~ $700k and the game has probably generated revenues of $250,000 (optimistic estimate) --- and there is the updating and patching since launch plus the upcoming console version, which OS admitted they are paying with management/owners own money (probably the $3.5 million series A stock sale last autumn).

UA cost 505 and OS a massive amount of money.

 

[Nyast]

But in whose pockets did that money end up ? Certainly not the Unity intern that coded the entire thing. Neither the artists that made the plastic floating lizards.

 

[Nyast]

The numbers don't even add up. If UA took $6M over 4 years for 15 full-time developers, each developer would have been paid an average $100K/year.

We know for a fact that they put the project on hold for half that time, and that less than 15 devs worked full-time on it, and the salaries certainly didn't amount to $100K/year.

Let's take 10 devs full-time for 2 years at $60K/year, that's "only" $1.2M. Maybe add another year of "research" and "pre-production" ( fucking around, in reality ). You've still barely reached half of the claimed budget.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

The numbers don't even add up. If UA took $6M over 4 years for 15 full-time developers, each developer would have been paid an average $100K/year.

We know for a fact that they put the project on hold for half that time, and that less than 15 devs worked full-time on it, and the salaries certainly didn't amount to $100K/year.

Let's take 10 devs full-time for 2 years at $60K/year, that's "only" $1.2M. Maybe add another year of "research" and "pre-production" ( fucking around, in reality ). You've still barely reached half of the claimed budget.

Did you include hookers and blow in your calculations?

 

[BEvers]

They didn't say "half", they said "less than half".

 

[MasterLobar]

I take "less than half" as "not half, but close to half". If it was one-third or one-fourth, one wouldn't say "less than half", right.

If we take the lower bound for SS3 ($12 million), it's reasonable to assume "less than half" means something in the range $4.5-5.9 million.

 

[lukaszek]

deterministic system > RNG

 

[MasterLobar]

Let's take 10 devs full-time for 2 years at $60K/year, that's "only" $1.2M. Maybe add another year of "research" and "pre-production" ( fucking around, in reality ). You've still barely reached half of the claimed budget.

Good point...doesn't really add up. But some further expenditures I could think of:
- Office space in Boston for 10-15 people (I'd say at least 100k a year)
- Software, hardware, licenses (h/t lukaszek)
- Travel expenditure
- Support staff and other overhead costs (legal advice, personnel management, accounting etc.)
- External services (e.g., the UI and inventory symbols were procured from an external provider)
- Expenditures for marketing and sales
- Employee benefits (social benefits, insurance etc.)

And perhaps the average salary is closer to 80k. I don't think Tim Stellmach works for 60k and the higher folks, Game director etc., won't either.

So let's say 10 x 80k for 3 years makes $2.4 million plus rent and the other stuff...could well be close to 4 million.

Also note "budget" doesn't mean that all the money was necessarily spent.

 

[Nyast]

That's why I talked of average. There's no doubt the executives and main engineers got a higher salary than that. 100K or above.

But then you've got a bunch of artists ( none of which that seemed particularly experienced ), QA testers ( lol ), etc.. Certainly their salary wasn't 80K+ too ? That'd be far above industry average.

It didn't feel like they did a lot of marketing on their own either. Wasn't that 505's job ? Unless 505 expenses were included in the budget ( that'd make no sense, the way he talked about it was about the development budget, not what third-party companies had spent ) it can't amount to a high number.

Software, hardware and licenses costs are spread over many years, can't amount to much per year either ( at least relatively to salaries ).

 

[LESS T_T]

You can see lots of outsourcing here, especially in art department:

For future references, credits:

 

[Katana1000S]

Underworld Ascendant is shit and System Shock 3 will never get released.

 

[BEvers]

Having also worked at Dragon's Eye Productions, I can say that the programming team and web development team were almost all volunteers also. There was very little managing, and quite a bit of polite asking. But I will admit, it looks good on a resume.

Apparently he was one of the few paid employees on Furcadia:

 

[Incendax]

Apparently he was one of the few paid employees on Furcadia:

Yeah. It was a big deal when he started getting paid.

 

[SophosTheWise]

But the philosopher kings in the Ivory Tower are still happy:

This sort of thing is such a cop out.

The reason why people can claim "hey great ideas are easy, I have heaps of them!" is because they don't have to prove that they're good ideas. Most of the time they're just not.

For example making your game with no save system is a REALLY BAD IDEA

I agree. There's no such thing as an "idea for a game". I blame Plato for that whole idea shtick. A game is playable, an idea is not, so "idea for a game" seems like a dumb contradiction.

 

[BEvers]

Update 4 may finally introduce escort quests:

 

[Cael]

Update 4 may finally introduce escort quests:

The worst kind of quest in the entire RPG genre and they added it 4 "updates" later... This is really reminding me of: